The Pride of Hannah Wade (33 page)

Five minutes before she would have welcomed the opportunity to escape. The strain of coping with the probing questions, the implied censure in the comments, the speculating looks, had been an ordeal. Yet Stephen’s attitude irritated her. She suspected that his concern was not so much for her welfare, but for the risk of a too revealing word.

“Not yet,” Hannah demurred. “I haven’t finished the champagne Captain Cutter so kindly poured for me.” She lifted the crystal goblet to her lips, sending a brief glance at Cutter over the rim of it.

“Would you care for more, Major?” Cutter reached for the bottle.

“No!” The sharp refusal was belatedly tempered by a stiff, “Thank you.”

With a small shrug indicating that it was Wade’s choice, Cutter picked up the bottle and filled his own glass. Hannah’s respite from the questions ended as Mrs. Bettendorf approached the refreshment table.

“Champagne, Mrs. Bettendorf?” Cutter still held the bottle in expectation of filling the empty glass she carried.

“No, no. Another glass and I’d be tittering.” She set the crystal goblet at the back of the table and turned her attention on Hannah. “I’m sure it must be so wonderful to be among civilized society once more. I truly don’t know how you managed to endure such a heinous life. As I told the colonel, it must be a miracle.”

“Yes.” Hannah’s glance lowered to an absent contemplation of the lead crystal in her hand. The bitter irony of trading one ordeal for another was the foremost thing in her thoughts.

“I mentioned to the colonel that it would be a fine thing to have the minister from Silver City come to see you. I’m sure that after all you’ve been through you feel the need to talk to a man of God.” Mrs. Bettendorf smiled, but her look was curiously intent.

Affronted, Hannah stiffened. “I would welcome the opportunity to pray with a man of the cloth on any occasion, but I have committed no sin for which I feel the need to confess.”

The clear ring of her voice echoed in the room’s silence, her declaration heard by everyone present, reminding her that they were always listening and always watching. Bitterness welled in her, and hurt and anger.

Before the talk could pick up again, a call came from out of the night, muffled by the building’s walls.
“Corp’ral of the guard! Post number one!” And the call ran back along the sentry line.

Immediately a shift of attention stirred through the room. The fort’s rhythm had been disturbed, and everyone was keyed to the change, sensing trouble. Lieutenant Digby excused himself and quietly left the quarters as the running tramp of booted feet crossed the quadrangle.

The wives made a concerted effort to start up the conversation again, but the talk was desultory. They went through the motions, each with one eye and one ear tuned to what was happening outside, awaiting news of the cause of the alarm. Hannah welcomed the distraction that relieved her of their attention. An agitation gripped her, which she tried to quell with a gulp of the flat champagne.

Within minutes, Digby slipped back inside, breathing hard and barely containing his excitement. “Colonel Bettendorf.” He crossed quickly to his commander. “A wagon carrying supplies to the mine’s been hit by Apaches. One of the outriders got away to come for help.”

Outside a bugler sounded the call to horse. Everyone moved toward the door, the party abruptly ending. Stephen left Hannah’s side to go to his commander, his shoulders squared in military attention. She saw in him the eagerness for action, a need to engage the enemy in a blood-battle, and knew that this thirst to fight did not come solely from the soldier in him. Some part of it was a desire for vengeance for what they’d done to him through her.

“I’ll go, sir,” he volunteered.

“Take twelve men,” Bettendorf said, nodding his agreement, and started for the door, inquiring of Digby, “The rider, did he say where the wagon was? Any estimate of the Apaches’ strength?”

Many times in the long-ago past, Hannah had lived through these moments when her husband prepared to head a patrol responding to some call of trouble. As she followed him outside into the cool of a high desert night, the familiarity of it all contained a strangeness as well. Hastily moving men spilled out of the barracks, their voices raised, and the air was charged with tension. Stephen headed for the parade ground at a trot.

“Hooker!” His hard command rang out clearly as he called to the top sergeant. “I want the first twelve men you find ready! Either company!”

Dark shadows moved through the night, shapes outlined by the starlight above and the lantern light spilling from the barracks windows. Hannah saw a rider being helped from his horse and Doc Griswald’s pudgy shape hurrying in that direction.

A light flared near her. Cutter lit one of his long, thin cigars, his hand cupping the flame, and released a puff of aromatic smoke that scented the night. His watchful gaze was on the activity boiling around the parade ground. As if sensing Hannah’s eyes on him, he glanced her way and seemed to absorb her with a look. Hannah was slow to turn from it.

Troopers lined up in the middle of the parade ground, hustling under the urging of their sergeant. Stephen conferred with Colonel Bettendorf and the corporal of the guard. From her position on the walk, Hannah could hear snatches of their words, information about the number of supply wagons, drivers, and guards, and the approximate location along the canyon road.

“Prepare to mount!” Hooker’s deep voice lifted across the parade ground. “Mount!”

The resounding noise of legs slapping leather as a dozen soldiers mounted in unison, the horses grunting and snorting, filled the night. The column was ready to
move out. Almost belatedly, Stephen remembered Hannah and rode over to say a quick farewell. His fresh, eager horse curvetted in place, its hooves beating a tattoo on the hard-packed ground.

For a few seconds, he looked down at her, controlling his restless mount with little effort. When his glance fell away from her, his expression was riddled with tension, the straight lines of his mouth partially hidden under the dark bristle of his mustache. Hannah folded the wool shawl more tightly across her breast.

“You’ll be all right?”.

“Of course,” she said.

“I’ll see Mrs. Wade safely back to her quarters.” Cutter held the cigar between his fingers, white smoke trailing upward. “Good hunting, Major.”

A salute acknowledged both comments; then Stephen wheeled his horse away and sent it toward the mounted column. The signal was given. “Right by twos, march!” The line began moving, dark and indistinct, a mass of serpentine shadows. “Gallop!” The ground rumbled with the pounding hooves as the column swept out of the parade ground and headed toward the road to Silver City. They melted quickly from sight, but the clatter of horses’ hooves and equipment echoed through the night for several minutes.

The party guests had begun dispersing when Hannah turned to take her leave of her hosts. She felt the weight of the group against her, the veiled disapproval and censure that lurked behind their unsmiling glances.

“Thank you so much for this evening’s party, Mrs. Goodson.” Her good manners prevailed to keep everything proper and polite. “From both my husband and myself.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Wade. Although I must say, I was surprised that your husband volunteered to take the patrol out,” Maude Goodson remarked with open
speculation. “I would have expected him to be less eager to leave you alone so soon.”

“Duty has always come first with him,” Hannah replied stiffly, and turned in the direction of the cigar smoke. “If you’re ready, Captain? Good evening, Mrs. Goodson.”

It was difficult to walk at a sedate pace with this desperate, driving anger pushing at her feet, but Hannah tried to control the length of her stride. Cutter walked beside her, the Mexican cigar clamped between his teeth.

Hannah was glad of his silence, preoccupied as she was with the sense that she had been on trial tonight, her actions judged and found improper. It was all so unfair! She had been an unwilling victim of all that had happened to her, yet she was being condemned for it. She carried the stigma of having been an Apache squaw, and in their eyes that made her tainted and unclean. If she had died at the hands of her assaulters, she would have been widely mourned. But she had lived, and they blamed her for it. She was rigid with anger, her nerves strained, her emotions in conflict as a raging temper brought her close to tears.

At the door to her quarters, Hannah paused. “Thank you for seeing me home, Captain.” She reached for the door latch.

“It’s difficult, isn’t it?” The quiet, low-voiced words checked her movement. She stopped, facing the door, her head bowed but turned in his direction.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Captain.” She was stiff with pride, yet drawn by that hint of understanding she so badly needed.

“I think you do, Mrs. Wade.” He removed the cigar from his mouth, its tip a glowing red ember in the night. “I heard what they said, what they asked. Nobody gave you an easy time of it tonight.”

“Why?” The slope of her shoulders increased,
bowed under the weight of the blame she didn’t understand. “What have I done?”

“It isn’t what you’ve done so much as it is what they’ve been taught.” Cutter studied the thread of blue-gray smoke from his cigar as Hannah half-turned toward him to listen. “Some mothers teach their children that if their candy gets dropped in the dirt, it isn’t good anymore because no amount of washing will ever make that piece of candy clean again.”

A humorless sound came from her throat. “Maybe you should never have picked me up, Captain. Maybe you should have left me where you found me.”

“You don’t really mean that, Hannah—I’m sorry: Mrs. Wade,” he corrected his uninvited familiarity.

“Please call me Hannah.” She gave her permission, then became conscious of the pleasure she’d felt at the sound of her name from his lips. “Do people ever outgrow their aversion to washed candy?”

“They just have to get hungry enough.” Cutter took a last drag on the cigar and tossed it to one side, its red tip tracing an arcing path in the black night.

“And if they don’t?” The question was almost a challenge.

“Then they’re fools,” he concluded evenly.

“You are good for my morale, Cutter.”

“I’m not sure that was in my mind.” He straightened. In the shadows, she could see the wide cut of his shoulders, against the night’s darkness. Somehow she knew he wasn’t smiling when he touched his hat to her. “Evening, Hannah.”

She watched him move off the porch and stride into the night, her thoughts on Cutter rather than her own situation. She wondered at this taciturn man who seemed to shrug away so many things that troubled others. They just didn’t bother him. He had the desert’s hard vitality and strength—and its impartial acceptance of all that lived. Yet Hannah suspected that he had once
been hot-tempered and reckless, until the Civil War had cooled his fiery ardor and the Apache frontier had taught him caution and forced an indolence on him. And he had a sense of fairness. She lost sight of him in the shadows and finally turned to enter her quarters, regretting that Stephen did not share some of Cutter’s views.

On the other side of the parade ground, the call to horse had summoned families from their Suds Row housing. Wives emerged with sleepy, sobbing youngsters on their hips and older children scattered about them. They watched the patrol depart, most with their husbands at their sides and a few whose men were among the troop galloping into the night.

When the blackness had swallowed them and distance muffled the drumming hoofbeats, Cimmy Lou lingered with the others, mentally following the patrol. With vague reluctance, she turned to join the growing numbers of onlookers who were wandering back to their canvas shacks. She dawdled, walking with a slow swing of her hips, hugging the heavy shawl around her while she gazed at the star-dusted sky.

Frustration and irritation increased the longing in her. She didn’t want to go back to that empty cot, still warm from John T.’s body, and the bedcovers all musky with the smell of him. He was top sergeant; he had to be the first to respond to the call—he kept telling her that. Sometimes Cimmy Lou hated the chevrons he wore with such pride, even though she had married him because of them—because he was the best, because he had top rank, and because John T. could satisfy her— when he was around.

Something stirred in the deep shadows between the close-standing tents. Cimmy Lou sent a quick glance that way to probe the darkness, the ever present danger from the Apaches too real for suspicious movement to
be ignored. A shadowy form motioned to her, a tall, narrow figure. A heady sureness went through her as Cimmy Lou looked around to see if anyone else had noticed him, a secret smile on her lips.

“Why, Private Bitterman. Ain’t it late fo’ you to be comin’ by fo’ yore laundry?” she chided, knowing full well what had brought him around. She looked into his avidly shining eyes, so catlike and black.

“I been waitin’ fo’ you,” he said with some reluctance, a hard tension making him curt. “You know that.”

“How could I?” Cimmy Lou half-turned away, punishing him for his bluntness.

“I knew Hooker’d go with that patrol an’ leave you all alone t’night.” His glance traveled down her profile to the shawl-covered mounds of her pushed-up breasts, her arms crossed under them. Reaching out, he stroked a finger along the line of her jaw and, applying pressure under her chin, turned her face toward him. He wanted her and didn’t like the idea. That pleased her, and made her wonder how much command she had over him. “I never shoulda kissed you.”

“I know what yore thinkin’—what yore wantin’, Leroy Bitterman,” she taunted him. “You ain’t no different than any other man.”

“I came to tell ya to leave me alone, woman. Don’t you be a-waggin’ that tail o’ yores at me, an’ givin’ me yore looks,” he warned. “I ain’t like the others. That top sergeant of yores ain’t gonna stop me.”

For a moment Cimmy Lou stiffened against his accusations; then a rising curiosity eased her. “I never asked you to wait here fo’ me t’night. You did that on yore own.”